THY SHALT NOT OFFEND, EVER!

Twenty years ago I made a short film, Visions of Ecstasy, which was refused a certificate for release on the grounds that it was potentially blasphemous, effectively banning the film and stopping it from ever being shown. In the summing up I was deemed to have ‘outraged the divinity of Christ’ and it was feared that the public broadcasting or distribution of my film was a threat to public order and since then, for better or worse, ‘visions’ has sat on my shelf gathering dust. Preserving God’s divinity and saving the country’s streets from riots and baying mobs seeking divine retribution. As a result of this I have had, aside from a loathing of State censorship, an equally strong dislike of religion, particularly when followers of a religion seek to use the State to enforce their values. So it was with some surprise this week that I found myself not only siding with some Christians but actually getting angry on their behalf as the zealots of political correctness, appeasement and ‘cultural diversity’ sought to further the advancement of their new PC Jerusalem by censoring personal beliefs and the dress of Christians.

In the first of three separate incidents, a Christian couple, Ben and Vogelenzang, were charged with breaching Section 5 of the Public Order Act, which apparently covers causing harassment, alarm or distress, because they allegedly insulted a Muslim woman. The Muslim in question was staying at the Bounty House Hotel in Liverpool, which is run by the Vogelenzangs, when a conversation arose about her faith. During the chat one of the topics discussed was whether Jesus was a minor prophet as Islam teaches or whether he was the son of God as Christianity teaches.

It was further stated by the fun-loving intellectual Mr Vogelenzang, that Mohammed was a warlord, while the equally philosophical Mrs Vogelenzang stated that she thought the burka was a form of bondage for women. Apparently this line of conversation so outraged the woman that she felt compelled to rush to the nearest policeman who, instead of telling her to grow up and get a life, questioned the Christian couple and charged them with a ‘religiously-aggravated public order offense’. They are now awaiting trial.

Now, to my mind, having a chat or an argument about politics or religion or whatever is what makes the world go round, and a religiously-aggravated assault would have meant that the Christians had donned Mahamoud Ahmadi-Nejad face masks and fist-fucked Ms sanctimonious up the arse while reciting the ten commandments and telling her to convert, as opposed to having a quiet tete-á-tete about the pros and cons of shrink-to-fit burkas. Still, I’m sure that the police know best and rounding up Christian law-breakers is really going to make us all feel safe out on the streets.

The UK’s next ‘feed them to the lions’ moment came when Exeter NHS nurse, Shirley Chaplin (no relation to Charlie, though he probably scripted her case), refused to remove her crucifix neckless and now faces the sack. Chaplin is the second nurse this year to suffer this fate as NHS nurse Caroline Petrie was suspended in February for the same ‘offense’. Chaplin has apparently worn her crucifix for 38 years without hordes of non Christians running out of Exeter’s NHS hospitals in shock and horror that a ‘christian’ was openly walking the wards.

It would have been interesting had Exeter’s wannabe twat-boy suicide bomber, Muslim convert Nicky Reilly, not failed in his attempt to blow up a café to see whether the local NHS authorities would have rushed around getting Muslim nurses to remove their ‘approved’ headscarves in case they gave offense to non-muslim infidels who had just had their limbs blown off? I doubt it.

The UK’s third Christian pogrom has, surprise, surprise, come from the Government, where so much nonsense comes from these days, and is contained in the hysteria-driven new legislation called ‘lets protect little children from everything and wrap them in cotton wool until they are 18’, or the ‘Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA)’, as it's more popularly known.

Under this new legislation, anyone coming within two miles of children has to be vetted by the ISA to see if they are a crazed sexual predator, murderer or a Scout master whose idea of getting ‘hands-on’ experience is to turn the local camp into a nonce nirvana. Christians, who are well known for their happy-clappy-touchy-feely tendencies, are of course worried that the authorities have singled out the ‘touchy-feely’ part of the bible for special attention, and they have.

From summer 2010, everyone from School governors to dentists and nurses (though not crucifix-wearing ones as they will have all been sacked) must have their backgrounds checked by the ISA, as must authors who visit schools and parents who organise lifts to sports matches and so on. Christians fear that, because of their beliefs on homosexuality, marriage and of course shrink-to-fit burkas, they could be unfairly targeted by this legislation and have their careers ruined as a result, which, given current trends, is quite likely. So now the UK's Christians, the people that for years who were seen as the guiding moral force in the land, the people who used to pack our churches on a Sunday morning and whose quaintness was, like rain on bank holidays, robins and Rupert annuals, forever England, are now being persecuted by the forces of multiculturalism, mediocrity and modernity.

Normally, the trials of tribulations of a few Christians would, like the idle wind, pass me by, but such is the speed and unceasing advance of political correctness, appeasement and abasement by the authorities to all things Islamic that I felt genuinely aggrieved by their plight. In particular because petty officialdom mixed with an almost fawning desire to please and carry favour with all things Sharia (note the Home Office announcement to its employees not to eat food in front of their Muslim co-workers during Ramadan as it might make them feel hungry or Councils desire to rename Christmas as a ‘holiday’ and to remove Christmas trees) is destroying our pagan/Christian roots and the moral basis on which we live.

The religious base of this country is pagan and then Christian and, whether we like Christianity or loathe it, its key commandments form the moral code which holds us together. We know that it is wrong to kill, to steal and to fuck our friends' partners and get jealous when someone has more than us and these rules and a few others have for centuries made us what we are. As we have have become less religious so the laws have been weakened and amended, we no longer lock homosexual men up or burn witches, but generally the Christian moral code still holds sway, or rather it did.

With the demise of Christianity will fall our values, not all at once of course and not immediately, but they will fall. Every assault on Christianity is an assault on our wider freedoms, on women’s freedoms, on sexual freedom, on, ironically, religious freedom and the freedom of speech and into the gap will step another religion. A religion whose moral code allows for no dissent, no sexual freedom, no individual rights and which will enforce its laws totally. It is a religion that would, were it in control, certainly not allow a member of another religion to discuss and comment on its shortfalls and allow complaints against it to be made in law. In fact one of its first acts, should it become the leading religion in the UK, will almost certainly be to abolish Section 5 of the Public Order Act and its ubiquitous religiously-aggravated public order offense. We should abolish it first, reclaim the moral high ground, celebrate our culture and protect the Christians in our midst, for without them the country will move another step closer to the abyss.

Hallelujah

IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

For some reason, and without any rhyme, I have become increasingly obsessed by end of the world science fiction films these last few weeks. Usually my thoughts, such as they are, flit between the Third Reich, an idyllic England that probably never existed but in my mind resembles Devon circa 1965 and large, milky-white breasts preferably attached to a sex-crazed woman whose own obsession is to sit naked on my face and wriggle, slowly.

As an obsession this future sci fi doom scenario began quietly and, by obsessional standards, surreptitiously with my re-reading some predominately 1950s and 1960s novels over the last few weeks including John Wyndham’s brilliant Day of the Triffids and the gorgeously haunting Chocky, Edmund Cooper’s All Fools Day and Kronk and a few forgotten gems like Steve Frazee’s Sky Block (Bodley Head, 1955) and George O. Smith’s Hellflower (Bodley Head, 1955). These apocalyptic tomes sowed the seeds of my own personal journey to a kind of McCarthyite nirvana where mankind or rather mankind as personified by pockets of very middle class ‘nice’ people fought off nasty, untrustworthy aliens and, after many setbacks, won.

And thus it came to pass that I watched on an almost daily basis films like ‘War of the Worlds’ including both the 1953 version and the 2005 versions, Independence Day, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Day After, Threads, The Omega Man, Day of the Triffids, No Blade of Grass, Village of the Damned, The Earth Dies Screaming, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Gattica, I Robot, Planet of the Apes and a film that terrorized me as an eight year old, Dr Who - Invasion Earth 2150 AD.

Why my usually earth-bound mind had filled with end-of-the-world visions perplexed me for a while, particularly as all references to this phenomenon usually cite the fifties fear of communism and the burgeoning Cold War as the cause. Which, given that all the West has to fear coming out of Russia right now is the nouveau riche and visually disturbing fashion, meant I was obviously barking at the wrong shoulder pads. But fifties sci fi films did capture a mood and a sense of a nation's fear. Fear of communists and of invasion purvey films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Invaders from Mars more than anything else and, despite Senator Joe McCarthy's perhaps overzealous patriotism, the alien was the bad guy, and the bad guy was communist scum, admittedly portrayed as a little green man, but commie scum nevertheless.

It is interesting that in the original 1953 version of War of the Worlds, mankind, personified by action man actor Gene Barry, is prepared to fight the alien no matter what the cost and to exhaust every remedy in their desire to fight to the last. But in Spielberg's 2005 reworking of the War of the Worlds. mankind, personified by new man Tom Cruise, is portrayed as a fleeing, craven rabble where even the ‘hero’ is shown killing a man who had hidden him and his daughter from the aliens because the man who saves him is prepared to fight the invader and Cruise is worried that the noise of the man’s gun might alert other nearby aliens and consequently endanger him and his daughter. So Spielberg reduces the fighter to a crazed ‘survivalist’ that Cruise has to kill in order to survive. Crazed man bad, craven man good is the modern message which that means that 21st Century man doesn’t kill and fight the invader he hides and flees and lets the alien assimilate him and his culture. Ultimately of course, mankind fails and is only saved by our bacteria which, unsurprisingly given how generally revolting we all are, poisons and kills the aliens. But still Spielberg leads by example and the example is give in.

In our brave new world there is no modern McCarthy to alert the citizens to the threat of an alien, dangerous ideal. Nor is there a fear of another Cold War because Communism has been trounced by the Capitalist West and hurrah the wicked commie alien witch is dead. Or is she? Perhaps she’s just changed sex, grown a beard and started believing in an ideology that is as vicious and as threatening to our way of life as anything that Marx and Lenin concocted. In fact, if anything, the witches new cave dwelling cronies are more dangerous because, since the fifties, we have lost the will to fight the alien and those that can or do want to fight, are portrayed, like Spielberg's gibbering survivalist, as dangerous fools. It is no coincidence that George Bush’s attempts, tragic as they were, to fight Islam were damned as the futile gestures of a ‘stupid’ man. The new ‘wise’ men reason and emphasize with the alien and alien culture for they see only goodness in aliens and will ‘assimilate’ their culture into our culture and eventually our differences will blur and we will all live as one. Cue singing birds and smiling, multi ethnic crowd.

In the post WWII world, where the shadow cast by Nagasaki and Hiroshima was still fresh and communist expansion into China and Korea were just happening, McCarthy saw a threat to the US and the US way of life that was very real and his ‘scare-monger’ views permeated society creating witch-hunts against perceived communists. Reds-under-the-bed scare stories were everywhere and many card carrying communists, trade unionists, socialists and indeed totally innocentists were arrested and quizzed by the FBI and also, which is often forgotten, many real Moscow connected spies and radicals were outed and exposed. Despite the cost in liberal sensibilities and a few left wing casualties, the Cold War was won and communist ideology silenced.

The ‘red’ Russian alien too would eventually be defeated, and ironically by another ‘tough’ actor from the fifties, Ronald Reagan. Reagan was also portrayed as stupid and hateful by the liberal media and, in particular, Europe’s left-leaning intelligentsia who ruthlessly lampooned Reagan from the moment he took office. They were so clever and he was so stupid but then what could Europe expect from America? What indeed. Here, proclaimed the liberal alien loving intelligentsia, is a crazed, gibbering, communist-baiting half-wit who will start a nuclear war, a man who won’t even talk to the Russian aliens. Well the alien-loving intelligentsia were wrong and the ‘stupid’ actor was right and communism collapsed and right now the intelligentsia are wrong again, only now there’s a ‘smart’ man in the Whitehouse with the hots for bearded alien witches and Spielberg is writing the script.

The 21st Century alien is not to be feared, its followers are not to be hated, and most of all it is not to be fought. In fact we created the alien with our bad policies and imperialist ways and now must make amends and even if the aliens do bad things now and then like fly planes into tall buildings or blow up tube trains we mustn’t get angry because most aliens aren’t like that and when they are its our fault anyway. We should in fact listen to the new Obama disciples, men like actor Sean Penn and director Oliver Stone, who has just made a love-you hugumentary about Venezuelan President, the thug Hugo Chavez, and who paraded with him arm in arm at the Venice film festival last week. Stone leads by example and gets into bed with the enemy. Not for Stone, the red-under-the-bed, the reds in his world are in his bed and fucking him up the arse!

No, the witch is not dead, she’s alive, has a beard, a poe-face, a hatred of women and a circumcised clitoris-severing cock and is preparing to lead her people out of the caves and into the promised land or, to be more specific, Europe. We now live in a world where the fifties' science fiction cold war analogies have become realities, only no one is listening. We need a big bad wolf like McCarthy to stir the people up and champion our imperialist, capitalist, wonderful and flawed world before it is too late and yes, we probably need a ‘stupid’ commie hating leader too. One who speaks from the heart rather than one who speaks well to the heart and who isn’t afraid to look a crafty alien in the eye from time to time and, if necessary, blow his head off. But most of all we need to tell Oliver Stone he’s crap.